StrangeQ:This one comment may have stood out more than others, but just about everything Romney said last night came across as him being an out of touch elitist prick if you were listening.

"We should grade schools so parents know where to send their kids."Yes, Mitt, because all parents are so fortunate as to have the means to send their kids to the school of their choice. And if you can't get your kid in that top notch school? Well, too bad, shoulda had more money..

Don't know about you, but I used greatschools.org when looking at schools for my kid.

djh0101010:If it had been balanced, you'd see the overall debt total go down, which you can see it doesn't.

The budget could be balanced (and it was), but that doesn't necessarily mean that the debt would have gone down.

There was a tax surplus. That money could have gone towards paying down the debt, but it wasn't. It also could have gone towards giving a tax cut to Americans instead. Or it could have gone towards starting up new government programs, or increasing funding for current ones.

soj4life:His comment that you can not balance the budget by raising taxes is what sticks out because it shows that he does not know math or any kind of accounting. Along with that, he wants to add another $2 trillion in unnecessary military spending.

Well, yeah, if you raise taxes on the uber-wealthy then they'll take their ball and go home, which means no jobs for anybody, which means we'll all have to crack open each others' skulls and feast on the goo inside. And that does nothing to help lower the deficit, and we all know if we don't lower the deficit it will one day hunt us down, steal our women and children and give us the butt cancer.

Lando Lincoln:stampylives: How the fark can people say he "won"? That's like having a debate about what color they sky is, the guy on the orange side just saying, "NO! ORANGE!" over and over, and then being like... well, orange sure seemed confident, even though hes been saying blue for the last 18+ months. Guess orange wins.

For years, Republicans have been fighting against the use of facts in politics. Well, they've finally won. This debate was the first in the post-facts political era. It's an exciting time to be a politician.

djh0101010:hdhale: Except that the budget was balanced in the 90s, so the Cold War debt was paid off.

No, it wasn't balanced by Clinton, he used enron-esque tactics to claim it did. And balanced budget vs. debt is a hugely different thing.

[www.brillig.com image 474x471], from http://www.brillig.com/debt_clock/faq.html for instance. If it had been balanced, you'd see the overall debt total go down, which you can see it doesn't. And we haven't paid OFF the debt until that number drops to zero.

I tried to read the rest of your points, but couldn't, because I'm thinking they're based on your flawed opening statement.

Holy crap, what happened in 2001 that caused that incredible increase in the debt?

Lando Lincoln:djh0101010: If it had been balanced, you'd see the overall debt total go down, which you can see it doesn't.

The budget could be balanced (and it was), but that doesn't necessarily mean that the debt would have gone down.

There was a tax surplus. That money could have gone towards paying down the debt, but it wasn't. It also could have gone towards giving a tax cut to Americans instead. Or it could have gone towards starting up new government programs, or increasing funding for current ones.

Ding ding ding, we have a winner. Just because revenue was higher than expenditures + debt interest for a given year doesn't mean it was applied to the debt.

Lando Lincoln:mcsestretch: Obama had his chance. Now it's time for someone who knows what he's doing to take over.

I'd like to meet this candidate. Where is he?

I think he means Mitt Romney, which is strange, because the Mitt Romney who won the debate last night promised different things than the Romney who campaigned for the RNC nominee did, who in turn promised different things than the Romney who campaigned for Governor of Mass. Which Romney does he want I wonder.

Balchinian:hdhale: kayanlau: Romney couldn't dent the deficit with the PBS cut. It is a mere 0.012% of budget.

You would prefer another target, an entitlement target? Then name the entitlement program! I grow tired of asking this so it will be the last time: *Where* is the money to balance the budget?

I can answer this very easily, plainly, and clearly. The answer is that there is no money to balance the budget, and we are all economically farked. The struggle in DC anymore is not how to balance the budget. They all know it can't be done. The struggle is how to keep juggling shiat around to make it last long enough to collect their pensions and get them into off-shore accounts, and time it so the other party is in control when it all comes tumbling down.

It is like that old vaudeville act where the guy is spinning plates on sticks. There are far too many plates to keep spinning, there have been for years, and everyone knows that you can't keep plates spinning forever anyway. It is all going to come crashing down, so nobody is really truly trying to do anything to keep that from happening. They are just trying to stall and posture so that when the plates do all fall down they can come out of it without any cuts and can point the finger at the other guy. In the meantime, they all keep smiling at the audience as if everything is going to be great, the music keeps playing, and as long as you don't look too closely everything seems fantastic.

tommyl66:soj4life: His comment that you can not balance the budget by raising taxes is what sticks out because it shows that he does not know math or any kind of accounting. Along with that, he wants to add another $2 trillion in unnecessary military spending.

Well, yeah, if you raise taxes on the uber-wealthy then they'll take their ball and go home, which means no jobs for anybody, which means we'll all have to crack open each others' skulls and feast on the goo inside. And that does nothing to help lower the deficit, and we all know if we don't lower the deficit it will one day hunt us down, steal our women and children and give us the butt cancer.

Yep, they'll just pack up and leave, GE, GM, Boeing, Wall Street, White Westing House, Time Warner, Ford... They'll all just pack up and leave won't they? Just like they did in the generations past... There are entire generations of cars missing from ford because they left the US in the 70's, 80's, and 90's when taxes were 10% higher than they are now... The jobs just packed up and left, no one worked, no one prospered, the county was a desolate wasteland wasn't it?

Martin Silenus:Lando Lincoln: mcsestretch: Obama had his chance. Now it's time for someone who knows what he's doing to take over.

I'd like to meet this candidate. Where is he?

I think he means Mitt Romney, which is strange, because the Mitt Romney who won the debate last night promised different things than the Romney who campaigned for the RNC nominee did, who in turn promised different things than the Romney who campaigned for Governor of Mass. Which Romney does he want I wonder.

lumiere:Needsun: I think the mental midgets have, once again, missed the point.PBS is a commercially viable product capable of supporting itselfand showing a profit on the bottom line. Why are they collectingwelfare from the feral gub'amint (aka taxpayers)? Oh, it's ONLY.0012%! The amount of support isn't relevant, the fact they'rebeing supported at all is the issue. Don't worry tho - your foodstamp president will come to the rescue.

Jim DeMint: "From 2003 to 2006, 'Sesame Street' made more than $211 million from toy and consumer product sales."

PolitiFact: "We got the 2009 990 tax form submitted by the Sesame Workshop, the nonprofit group that produces the show, and DeMint is correct. It shows Knell's salary at $806,990, with an additional $149,523 worth of other compensation. For the toy sales numbers, we have to go to the 2008 990 tax form. In a section on "other income," it reports "toys and consumer products" as bringing just over $211 million from 2003 through 2006 (nearly $53 million a year, on average)."

source^

Of course, the current appropriation for ONE year for the CPB is $445.2 million, so your and DeMint's definition of "profitable" seems not to reflect math or reality.

tommyl66:soj4life: His comment that you can not balance the budget by raising taxes is what sticks out because it shows that he does not know math or any kind of accounting. Along with that, he wants to add another $2 trillion in unnecessary military spending.

Well, yeah, if you raise taxes on the uber-wealthy then they'll take their ball and go home, which means no jobs for anybody, which means we'll all have to crack open each others' skulls and feast on the goo inside. And that does nothing to help lower the deficit, and we all know if we don't lower the deficit it will one day hunt us down, steal our women and children and give us the butt cancer.

If we are feasting on each other, wouldn't that lower the cost of medicaide and medicare? That would knock some expenses away.

hdhale:Except that the budget was balanced in the 90s, so the Cold War debt was paid off. We had to go into Afghanistan, so I'm sorry for your problems, but if that war wasn't justified, get on a plane and get out of my country. Iraq was a total judgment call and I personally would have order us in, but I wouldn't have just assumed that the natives would all be friendly like the French in 1944. Yes, your taxes should have gone up to the old Clinton era rates at some point, but also remember that the economy was on the downhill slide BEFORE Bush took office, thanks to the dotcom bubble bursting and thousands of high tech, high paying jobs disappeared over night. 9/11 didn't help either. Raising taxes without mobilizing the country properly (another Bush mistake IMHO...never declare a war on anything without a draft) would have made things worse.

There is a hell of a lot of blame to go around regarding why we went from the black (done with a Moderate to Liberal President and a basically Moderate to Conservative Congress) to deep crimson with the Federal budget. What's also clear is that Mr. Obama means well but he's incapable of balancing the budget or even getting it moving in that direction. Mr. Romney at least gives us a chance...however slim...of getting back there.

Now wait just a minute... balancing the budget does not mean the debt was paid. No sir. You're not out of debt the moment you can afford to start paying back your debts, it does not work that way. Although the tech bubble burst was not helpful for the economy, we would nonetheless be facing a mere fraction of the debt we have now if Bush the Lesser had not cut taxes. Motivation for going to war and all of that is meaningless right now; we've done it, now we have to pay for the damn thing. We have to look forward and start paying this off. There are specific changes that will start covering that distance; raising SS and medicare eligibility ages, removing the SS cap for high incomes, and a range of other sensible corrections (like stopping pork barrel military projects), we can achieve a surplus and maintain virtually all government programs. That is a vaguely ideologically neutral position, one neither side will ever commit to, but it has the benefit of being big enough to fix the problem.

Cutting minor social programs gets us no where. Worse, it pushes the government even further from the people it serves.

i used to be an elmo hater too, until i had a kid that fell in love with him. now he has really grown on me. everything he does is cute

sprout already syndicates sesame street, maybe they'll pick it up

My brother freaking loved Elmo growing up. My grandmother totally fed into his Elmo love, too, and got him all sorts of Elmo stuff and would watch Elmo with him, and would have him talk about Elmo whenever we went to visit her at work with all the other office ladies. Even now, I still have a strong affinity for Elmo (and can still sing along with the Elmo's World song, last I heard), and my brother is 16.

/Thankfully I never worked at Sesame Place to destroy that affinity...

The entire budget of PBS amounts to about 0.012% of the entire country's budget. Combining the budgets of PBS, the NEA, and the Legal Services Corporation amounts to less than one half of one percent of what we paid just to defense services contractors last year.

Of course, those programs benefit the arts and the poor (but I repeat myself, hah), so they should be cut. Giving money to defense contractors for overpriced services is much more important.

Let's be honest, if they don't act like it's a somewhat competitive race, they can't hype up their coverage fro the next 5 weeks.

Actually, if you got to watch, it was indeed a clear win for Romney. It's hard to deny when even Bill Maher, Michael Moore, MSNBC and the Huffington Post all called it for Romney too. Obama's certainly not out, because things could change in the next two debates . . .

soj4life:If we are feasting on each other, wouldn't that lower the cost of medicaide and medicare? That would knock some expenses away.

In theory you're correct, but I have to assume eating the brains of your average Kardashian-watching, Wal-Mart shopping, Big-Gulp drinking American will get you pretty sick pretty quick, so health care costs will only go up.

LowbrowDeluxe:Needsun: I think the mental midgets have, once again, missed the point.PBS is a commercially viable product capable of supporting itselfand showing a profit on the bottom line. Why are they collectingwelfare from the feral gub'amint (aka taxpayers)? Oh, it's ONLY.0012%! The amount of support isn't relevant, the fact they'rebeing supported at all is the issue. Don't worry tho - your foodstamp president will come to the rescue.

No it isn't. You're making the same mistake the people focusing on Big Bird are, in conflating some successful studios who produce content for the PBS market with PBS. However, unlike those people, you're wrong on additional levels, because the removal of PBS would in fact destroy the product those studios make. In your invisible free hand capitalist utopia they would be forced to accept creative 'input' from the stations, modify content to fit advertisers, and eventually turn into the exact kind of toyetic crap that makes them and their ability to avoid that by being on PBS a breath of fresh air compared to the content available on the other stations. In short, you are a whore's john shilling for pimps, and should very much go fark yourself with a bag of burning cocks, you sulpherous whoreson.

And I mean that with all due honesty and intent. Anyone who goes after PBS deserves their world of reality TV and Paris Hilton, but I do not personally want to have to live in it as well. Your statement is either disingenuous or outright lying, and regardless of which, deserving of nothing but the outright scorn, contempt, and hatred of all thinking beings. "HURP if people wanted books, they'd go buy them, we should get rid of libraries! DERP electricity practically pays for itself, let the free market decide! HURPADERP if people want to drive in their neighborhood, they'd pay to have them paved, no need for gubmint handouts!" fark you. fark you. fark everyone you know. fark your whole entire extended family. Generally I'd rather ...

That's true. Romney said that his plan was not going to cost 5 trillion dollars. But he never did say how much his plan WAS going to cost, now did he? I wonder why.

The actual number is around 4.8 trillion.

That is the beauty, there is no "actual number".

The 20% cuts he mentioned will amount to 4.8 trillion, but he has some unamed "loopholes" or "deductions" he will remove that will reduce that number (impossible to reduce below 4.8 trillion). His refusal to specify what he wants to remove makes it impossible to call out specifics on how he is wrong.

tommyl66:soj4life: If we are feasting on each other, wouldn't that lower the cost of medicaide and medicare? That would knock some expenses away.

In theory you're correct, but I have to assume eating the brains of your average Kardashian-watching, Wal-Mart shopping, Big-Gulp drinking American will get you pretty sick pretty quick, so health care costs will only go up.

/It's just a theory

Well only for the first few weeks, then it will drop when the cannibals die.